The panel discussion that accompanied the AMD news conference was absolutely painful to watch. The only thing I learned is how completely clueless the CxOs of the 'cloud computing era' really are. Seeing company officers from Dell, RedHat and Facebook drool allover themselves like that was yet another painful lesson that the fratboys of the world have turned the tech industry into their drunken biatch.

What's sad is how bad the former CEO fucked AMD [insideris.com] by doing a total slash and burn on their engineering and R&D and pushing for cheaper automated layouts that simply don't cut it. The Athlon64 guys? GONE. The Cryix guys? GONE. they pretty much have their backs against the wall because the former CEO burned the fucking company to get a short term bounce, which I'm sure he cashed out on.

And anybody who thinks ARM will save them might be interested in some magic beans I have for sale, as ARM frankly doesn't scale very well and from the early looks ARM64 isn't gonna be really any better for power than the CULV Intel chips while having a HELL of a lot worse IPC. Frankly, and this is coming from someone who has been building AMD systems exclusively for awhile now and is still hanging onto AM3+ for all its worth, the only real selling point they had was "bang for the buck" but by burning R&D and killing Thuban the former CEO left them holding the bag without shit besides Bulldozer, which we all know blows too much power, is too damned hot, and frankly their octocores get stomped by Intel quads on IPC while using a third of the power.

I have to agree with the engineer in that link, they should have done the same thing Intel did with Core, go back to their earlier K8 designs and start from there just as Intel did with P3 mobile but now they just don't have the money or the time. I truly hope the Athlon64/Apple A6 chip designer they hired back can come up with a design to save the company because right now? Right now they really got nothing. Hell the former CEO even pulled the plug on Krishna, which would have been a sub 20w quad core bobcat, which is why all we're seeing now is minor speedbumps on a 3+ year old design. I swear they got fucked raw by bad management and I only hope they pull through. Maybe if they would have done this 4 years ago they could have the niche Nvidia now holds, but now? Its just not enough.

I completely agree (although the Cyrix guys weren't a part of AMD if I recall correctly, they're now Via).

I don't get why Via and AMD don't do any collaboration. Via seems to have decent CPUs and some pretty bright sparks in their CPU design division but they use fucking awful graphics chipsets. Or Via and Nvidia for that matter.

Indeed. The one order the CEO can give to save the company is this: "Magical turn-arounds for companies who have been f*cked only happens in textbooks and fair-tales; as such, all resources for CPU design will go into creating a Phenom III with 12 cores and PCI-Express 3.0 and an Opteron design which employs liquid cooling (for the short term), as we are going to give it a major Mhz boost on top of the extra cores / cache we are going to staple on."

Getting involved in the already overgrown ARM market shows nothing but lack of vision. "We're going where everyone else is going, that'll be profitable!" You are going to be *that* guy who shows up late to the party, and wonders why all the booze is gone. Seriously, how do you mismanage stuff this badly? You're a CPU company, and you come up with the brilliant plan that despite being a major competitor in the x86 market, you're going to fix things by buying an oversubscribed design for a CPU in a market that...recursion error.

Think of it being like Ford, not using its own resources to think up a new car design, but paying Honda to license it the design for the Civic. Things are either absolutely atrocious, like AMD's stock should be worth a Haitian penny right now bad and we just haven't been told anything, or somebody doesn't know what he's doing. Go get the old guys your predecessor fired, and bring them back for more money. Find the DEC guys, and offer stock options if you have to to get them on board. Then follow their advice. After a year or two of punishment, AMD will be back on firm ground again.

The more surprising thing is AMD going w/ a totally new architecture - the ARM64 - instead of one of the true tried & tested RISC CPUs out there. They could have licensed SPARC from Oracle, or POWER from IBM, or MIPS from Mips, taken an existing CPU design, made a chip quickly, and then in subsequent iterations, build on that.. There would also have been existing software platforms ready for them - not just Linux or BSD, but also things like Solaris, or AIX.

If AMD can push their engineering into ARM quickly, they might not only stand a chance but they might dominate fairly quickly, I'd think. They're not on par with Intel on die size, but IIRC they're pretty close - that knowledge is certainly applicable.

Remember, they've got good GPUs already. A lot of what they tried to do with the Mobility and later generations were very "ARM-like" already, it just didn't exactly work due to x86 limitations. I'd think they've got a pretty good chance overall. (If anything, it's a big market. Tegra# are really pushing NVidia along, after all...)

Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.

Any ARM CPU is at least an order of magnitude behind the current x86-64 server CPUs. Not to mention the additional work required to support multiple ARM CPUs on a motherboard, and even convince the major server manufacturers to build an ARM-based server in the first place. Good luck AMD, though you won't need it since even luck won't

Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.

That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?). With the global political landscape the way it is, that could be an important point of difference.

Reducing energy consumption is now the "in thing" and will continue to grow in purchasing decisions as financial incentives to reduce carbon emissions grow

That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?)....If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.

After 20 years of Wintel I finally caved to try a Mac. The new MBP Retina is insanely fast CPU-wise for t

This is almost certainly for a SeaMicro-based architecture. The GPU might be mildly irrelevant in this market today but will continue to gain importance as more tasks transition to being executable via OpenCL & its cousins.

What you are looking at is a small box densely packed with lots of cores. Another flavor will likely come as a box with a few weak ARM CPUs used to control a large quantity of GPUs for HPC applications.

The thing that will make or break ARM in a SeaMicro style chassis is whether they

Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance

Begging the question. Is power usage actually secondary? Not for many kinds of workloads, which are storage-intensive. For SOME servers it doesn't make sense. For OTHER servers, it clearly makes sense; people are already using ARM-based servers. Perhaps you should consider a little self-education.

I'm sure this is just AMD hedging their bets against multiple processor ISAs. There are places where ARM is better than x86/x86-64, so it makes sense to try and dominate those niches. It falls in line perfectly with AMD being a less expensive alternative to Intel.

Given that Intel is trying to wind down its StrongARM line it inherited from DEC, AMD may see the ARM line as a place where it can finally be top dog. It has the expertise to give Broadcom, TI and Samsung a run for their money.

Taking a really big drink from the hypothetical Kool-Aid, I could see ARM64 processors being used as x86-64 replacements in palmtops and laptops. There are a couple of x86 to ARM translators on the market, which would solve the binary compatibility issue. I used FX!32 back during the NT4 and NT5beta days with my DEC workstation, and it made emulated binaries about 90% as fast as native. With advances in JITC translators and a cleanup of the x86-64 ISA to make it closer to meeting Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements, I could see a good modern translator being 95+% as fast as native x86-64 code.

I've been expecting Apple to churn out a Power Book with an ARM processor and a binary translator. They did it with m68K -> PPC and PPC -> x86, so I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see x86 -> ARM. Now imagine it with an AMD ARM64 SoC at the heart of it.

An ARM processor doing binary translation for x86 would be like trying to tow an 18-wheeler with a Tata Nano. ARM may be low-power, but it's also...well, low-power. Even older Core 2 chips wipe the floor with ARM's latest and greatest from a performance standpoint.

Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.

They need a cute small name for the ARM cores to go with the bulldozer for the large cores: maybe call them Cats or Toros or Deeres, more lawn-mowery than bull-dozery.:) Anyway, why translate X86 to arm when you could recompile directly for ARM? Isn't that where GNU and Linux (or GNU and HURD) could show the advantage of free-software-open-source-software's source code access allowing for the direct or cross-compilation of the source code into binaries which run on the ARM?

How would that work in a situation where you have both x86 and ARM cores on the same system?

From what I've read, I definitely get the impression that AMD is doing some kind of modular system, whereby their APU cores can be coupled with either ARM or x86 variants. I'm not sure if that also includes ARM+x86 coupling, but that seems to be the point of "fabric" - it's a universal interconnect of some kind. However, how would that work in real life? What would be the advantage of it? ARM for seriously low power,

One possible way to make that work: when compiling to generate the Application Bundle [wikipedia.org] for a specific program, simultaneously generate two sets of code to include in the bundle:
1 - x86 code
2 - ARM code

Then, depending on power-resource utilization requests by the OS or directly by the user, the executing instance of the application can be migrated from one of the types of cores (eg x86 core) to one of the other types of cores (eg ARM-cores) by copying over (a) the current instances variable values, (b) th

I wouldn't want to tow an 18 wheeler with a Nano, but I also wouldn't want to deliver a small package to an inner city address with an 18 wheeler. Horses for courses (or pidgeons, horses and elephants for their respective courses if you will).

I just find it ironic that Apple could very well be going back to RISC after not even a decade of being on x86. Even more ironic given the amount of work Apple contributed with Acorn back in the 1980's.

A MacBook with ARM chip wouldn't surprise me. After all the iPad, iPhone, and iPod are all arm chips already.

But then again I bought this MBP earlier this year as well as parallels and Windows 7 Pro because I do enough development work on multiple platforms that i do need to test against windows as well as

Well, considering that they made the jump for the PowerPC architecture to the x86 architecture because IBM/Motorola could not provide a low power version of the G5 PowerPC chip to be used in the portable space of laptops, it doesn't seem ironic at all that Apple might consider using a low power consumption chip in the laptop or portable space at all. It almost makes darned-good-sense. .

And considering what they'd been doing with Pink / Taligent in keeping a parallel universe of development of their codebase always going on the x86 architecture while publicly showing only PowerPC development, they've probably got a skunks-work factory team somewhere that's already been running ARM-based IOS or even ARM-based OSX for a year if not for years...

Given that Intel is trying to wind down its StrongARM line it inherited from DEC, AMD may see the ARM line as a place where it can finally be top dog

Intel isn't trying to wind this line down, they sold it outright to Marvell two years ago. Even then, they were pretty anaemic. XScale was the P4 of the ARM world: twice as high a clock speed as everyone else but a much lower instruction-per-clock. It's an ARMv5 implementation, which seems painfully archaic today (especially given the lack of FPU, which even most ARMv6 implementations have).

Given that Intel is trying to wind down its StrongARM line it inherited from DEC, AMD may see the ARM line as a place where it can finally be top dog. It has the expertise to give Broadcom, TI and Samsung a run for their money.

Unless AMD has hired some of the bright names of ARM (and maybe they have, I've not been following such) they have essentially zero chance to come up to speed on ARM quickly enough to challenge any of the entrenched players any time soon.

Taking a really big drink from the hypothetical Kool-Aid, I could see ARM64 processors being used as x86-64 replacements in palmtops and laptops

Stop seeing that. It's not really plausible. There's no reason to do it, either, and there never will be unless ARM kicks x86's ass sometime in the nebulous future.

It's been said before on this thread, but I'll say it again. AMD remaining solvent while competing against Intel for 30 years is a lot more impressive than most people realize, especially considering they competed using Intel's own ISA. It's too soon to tell now, but it's reasonable to expect that AMD (being in Intel's weight class) could plausibly compete with most of the current ARM manufacturers. I'd certainly expect their 64 bit server chip efforts to be a lot more interesting than what the cell phone chip makers have been putting out from a performance perspective.

Uhh...what great chips? The Thubans were good, but everything based on Bulldozer just blows through power while having terrible IPC, thanks to having shared integer and floating point units. If they were to be honest the "modules" would be treated as single cores with hardware assisted hyperthreading, because the benches show that is a hell of a lot closer to what they are than to true cores. Hell since the release of BD they don't even have a single slot anymore on Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming CPU" [tomshardware.com] list whe

The Thubans were good, but everything based on Bulldozer just blows through power while having terrible IPC, thanks to having shared integer and floating point units. If they were to be honest the "modules" would be treated as single cores with hardware assisted hyperthreading, because the benches show that is a hell of a lot closer to what they are than to true cores.

Errrm, all of the integer units are dedicated and the shared floating point units still give each core as much floating-point resources as on the previous generation of AMD chips even if every single core is using floating point 100% of the time. If AMD hadn't screwed up on the engineering side, it'd be a really great design.

Then they should take some of their idle Sales / Marketing / Business guys, have them fly over to {country}, and let them spend some time charming the other foundries into not only giving them the capacity they need, but doing so at an excellent price. At the very least, it will give them something to do.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Intel had a team working on ARM ISA designs as a contingency plan, but I highly doubt they'd transition to ARM unless x86 was facing virtual annihilation. They're well aware that if they start releasing ARM chips, the whole industry will much more quickly transition away from x86. There's no way they would willingly destroy their extremely profitable, high-margin x86 business.

Intel will be doing the same thing in 3... 2... 1... Just like missing the 64-bit era with Itanium, it is missing he mobile era with Atom.

What are you even talking about? Since when did Intel miss the "64 bit era" as you put it? Sure, Itanium was a failure and Intel sunk billions of dollars trying to make it work. However, Intel could afford that mistake and still continue chugging along. As things stand today, Intel absolutely dominates the 64 bit market. In fact, except for Intel, AMD, and the IBM Power chips, there is no other game in town as far as 64 bit is concerned, and in this market, Intel probably has 80% or 90% market share, and ha

Intel went for IA-64 and it was a complete failure. Ultimately, it was forced to adopt the AMD-64 instruction set. That's what I mean -- Intel missed the boat and the 64-bit instruction set it uses isn't even its own. Since adopting AMD-64, it's dominated the market space. If it wants to get anywhere in the mobile space, it will need to fold its current Atom strategy and go all-out ARM. Until it does that, it's Itanium all over again.

Intel went for IA-64 and it was a complete failure. Ultimately, it was forced to adopt the AMD-64 instruction set. That's what I mean -- Intel missed the boat and the 64-bit instruction set it uses isn't even its own. Since adopting AMD-64, it's dominated the market space. If it wants to get anywhere in the mobile space, it will need to fold its current Atom strategy and go all-out ARM. Until it does that, it's Itanium all over again.

Okay, I get what you were trying to say earlier. Fair point too - because AMD64 was a vastly superior design and more importantly, a vastly more pragmatic design compared to what Intel was trying to shove down people's throats. Goes to show what hubris can do.

I'm not 100% sold on your recommendation of Intel dropping Atom and adopting ARM though. x86 is still very attractive to corporate clients and others who value legacy support and enterprise support. Business upgrade cycles are often very slow, and the

One of the bugbears of the ARM platform is the absence of mature, complete FOSS drivers for the embedded GPUs. e.g. PowerVR (proprietary), Mali (lima), Tegra (proprieatry), Adreno (Freedreno).

I could see Intel going the other way - keeping ARM at a distance but licensing its HD Graphics GPU to SoC manufacturers at minimal cost on the condition that they use Intel's factories to fabricate them.

(Just speculating - have no idea what % of a Sandy Bridge CPU's power draw is due to the graphics core(s))

When it comes to servers, I use comparatively few (a small lab with a few rack's worth that used for research projects) at work, so I'm wondering what sort of tasks these would be useful for? It sounds like they'll run RHEL and other Linux distributions, but even after looking at the second slide in this [hothardware.com] presentation, it's unclear to me advantage this would be to a a small business, or, in my case, a small department in a larger organization.

Is this new CPU/server line intended only for the enterprise? If so, what would the "trickle down effect" be for small groups like my own? Also, why would someone want to throw out their investment in existing hardware (including whatever talent they might have at programming and maintaining said hardware) for a design that's relatively proprietary?

Yeah I'm guessing this is geared more towards people who do the whole vendor support thing, and they've got a handful (or at least one) person dedicated to maintaining specific equipment (eg. linux servers vs. switches). Homogenous is key, but high thread count will also push ARM advantage here, because you could fit (say) 8 of these small systems with multiple CPUs each in a single 2U without much issue, and still leverage your SAN storage.

For IT shops with fewer than 24 typical servers, what AMD might do in 2014 is not relevant. You would not be interested in trying this thing until it was field proven for three years. Even if it arrived on time (not AMD's strong suit) and it was nerdvana, that's 2017 before you're racking it. More likely the first version is quirky and your pilot starts two years later. But let's say 2017, for giggles. A typical 2 socket rack server can now be configured with 32 2.7GHz cores, 768 GB RAM, and terabytes

Actually I see this eventually rendering "for X architecture..." irrelevant. The more important "for what OS" will be dealt with using VMs. The need for more cycles to pull all this off competitively will mean we finally find a use for all those "solutions looking for a problem" engineers have been dreaming up.

I disagree. I think that would be foolish for customers. It would be great for AMD though, because people would be upgrading left and right (or overspecifying) to make sure they don't wind up limited by one or the other.

It would make more sense for AMD to finally invent a system which can take asymmetric processors linked via HyperTransport, so that you can plug one amd64 or ARM processor and then however many amd64 or ARM processors you like after that.

Every x86 chip on the market is some secret, internal RISC design with an x86 translator in front of it. I do not believe it would be terribly difficult to redesign the translator unit to accept ARM code as well, although getting it to perform as well as x86 does may be challenging. With a decent design and some clever firmware, you could probably make it boot as either ARM or x86 depending only on a BIOS setting, and change cores on the fly.

x86/AMD64 is overkill for many server functions.It will be interesting to see if chips appear optimized for different functions.For example hardware sql accelerators or massive i/o for file serving.Since many hardware raid controllers are nothing but ARM cores anyway it would be interesting to see multiple cores, some used as RAID controllers and some more advanced cores for the os and file serving with a 10GB lan controller all on one chip.Add power, drives and Ram and have a killer file server.

AMD could be really fucked today because they put too much effort into graphics, and not enough effort into CPUs. Only time will tell if their graphics will save them. I suspect they won't unless they learn how to write drivers that work.

ARM architectures are considered more energy-efficient for some workloads because they were originally designed for mobile phones and consume less power.

Fuck no. The ARM1 was released in 1987 as a coprocessor for Acorn's BBC Micro. They were designed for low power operation because the engineers were impressed with the 6502's efficiency. There weren't any significant mobile phone deployments until 18 years later in 2005.

Almost. The first ARM1 was produced in 1985. This was used in the BBC micro coprocessor to design the ARM2. The first ARM2 silicon was produced in 1986 and the Archimedes computers, which ran on the ARM2, were released in 1987. I've still got my A310.

I read an article a while ago that stated that the ARM processors were so efficient by accident. They started from scratch with the design, not having the experience of Motorola, IBM, Intel and AMD of what a fully-fledged processor requires, and so it became a very simple one. This happens to be an important element for power efficiency.

Much like everyone else says, they were designed more for simplicity than anything else, and extremely low power consumption was an unintended side effect. Of course they were going for low power so they could use the cheap housings as mentioned above, but the frugal amounts it did actually eat were unintentional.

There was an article on The Register some months ago on ARM development history (can't seem to find it now), and if it's to be believed they were investigating a series of mysterious crashes in the

The market chose ARM over MIPS because MIPS stalled. You can still buy a SuperH core, but why would you do that? Same for MIPS. Unless you really don't need performance and you're getting a really great deal, it's a bit difficult to fathom. All the interest is in ARM, so that's where the talent is developing. And since newer stuff tends to be built on a lower process it's not just faster, but also lower-power which is what everyone and their mom (literally) is demanding today.

ARM is going to be a significant part of future server space. This issue comes up every so often on Slashdot and I always see the same reaction: x86 is the one true architecture and nothing will displace it. That's not a technically based opinion, it's a religious dogma.

When you're on the client side of the network, it makes no difference what's on the server side. It could be a giant room full of hamsters and abacus. As long as the results come back fast and correct, you shouldn't care. That's the way the internet was designed. Heck, that's why it'd called the Inter-Net. Inter networking between different processor platforms.

Intel is a one trick pony. Besides the evolution of the x86, they have never fielding an architecture that had any staying power. Anyone remember the i432 or the i860? The current standard x86-64 architecture was defined by AMD, not Intel. Itanium got that moniker because it was accurate. The only reason that the Itanium is alive is because of a civil suit by HP.

What Intel is really really good at is putting gates on silicon. They did not succeed on architectural grounds, but by having the best implementation of a clunky architecture. They were always able to succeed by using more gates at a lower price then the competition.

ARM is an architectural rival to x86. Intel won with the x86 because they could cram more gates onto silicon. They loose this advantage against ARM because ARM requires less silicon to do the same job. This translates to lower power usage, which is getting more and more important as time goes on. Other foundries can compete even if they are trailing Intel in processes capabilities, and they want to be in this market. As does AMD.

ARM also benefits from being the dominant architecture for the smart phone/tablet sector, which means that there is a large community of developers and all the software one could ever want. An ARM-centric ecology exists, and it applies to servers as well as client software. Linux/GCC/MySql are happy on ARM, so any open source server software is easily available. And Microsoft has shown they are ready to run on ARM as well. It's not a risk from a software point of view.

It's not that Intel/AMD x86 is going away, but ARM will also be a player. And we should all be glad about it, because AMD being less competitive with Intel is the road to monopoly, which means increased prices and a stagnant CPU sector.

I once saw a 1U rack that contained something like 16 ARM boards (the entire board, networked together with a switch, powered from individual cables, with disk interfaces over some custom central channel). It cost less, used less power, and did more in the same amount of space. It was a bit homebrew-esque (despite being a professional product), but the advantages were rife.

I was sorely tempted to use it just because, as you say, server-side doesn't matter for most things. And with that sort of basic setu

1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.

2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not

1) Kickstarter. Sign of a project doomed to failure when it concerns hardware, really. Especially where they are talking on the scale of producing hardware boards with en-masse dozens of cores on them from a few hundred thousand dollars.

That's just prejudice on your part. There are many amateurs doing Kickstarter projects they don't fully understand, but there are also some professionally done ones on there. The hard task of backing something there is to find out which of these two types the creator is.

2) No OS support - it seems to be a number-cruncher with an ARM-controller, not a generic computer with lots of software already ported. Nobody will rewrite their software to take advantage of it unless it's MADLY to their advantage (i.e. number crunchers, not generic machines).

It supports OpenCL, which is the standard for this kind of thing across many device types. Of course, if you're talking about web servers and databases, you might have a problem.

What other company could make a processor that does both x86 and ARM? Windows 8 that runs both ARM and legacy x86 apps? I could see that as being pretty differentiated. Their GPUs are on par with nVidia, and they have better processor microarchitecture.

Unlike the X86 community, there are so many more competitors in the ARMs camp - companies such as TI and Broadcom from USA, Samsung from Korea, Hitachi from Japan, Allwinner from China, which produces $7 ARM-based SoCs.

AMD, you can't even compete against ONE company in the x86 arena - Intel.

Are you sure you can complete against the whole slew of them, this time??

Your facts are off two ways. First, going up against one big monopolistic company is a lot harder than going up against a lot of small ones. (Do you think it's easier to fight an elephant or a bunch of guys who are also fighting each other,) Second, they've managed to survive in the x86 market for 30 years. I think that counts as competing.

Indeed. I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense. What was so hard about welding two Phenom II X6's together, using the hyperlinks already present in the CPU design, and calling it a day? Knowing full well that Intel wouldn't be able to compete with that design (they've been core adverse compared to AMD), being happy that all of the cores were full cores (who'd complain?), and that they'd be a hot item for system builders everywhere. Sure, some of the gaming websites like to barf about how single-threaded performance still matters, on some games that no one cares about (the GPU, of course, mattering a lot more than the single-threaded performance of a CPU here), but to take the advantage of having 6 full cores, and trade it in for 8 half-cores...was this some idiotic attempt at market segmentation? Did some moron in a suit have a brain fart, and think "we can't have 12-core Phenom IIIs, it will cannibalize our Opteron server sales"? Fire his ass, and cut the strings on his golden parachute on the way out.

For the life me, I just can't fathom how they turned a major market advantage, with the CPU design practically on the design table already, with a popular and critically acclaimed design, and decided that f*ck it, we're doing so well here, let's go for a lobotomy, and compete on Intel's turd with an unproven half-assed design. Let's go from a full-core design that everyone complements, to some terrible half-core design that nearly killed Intel at some point. Seriously, who is commanding AMD such that they were in their nappies when the whole Intel hyper-threading business was going down (which every half-decent tech knows about), and how did they get boardroom approval?

The proper response, of course, was not the Business School of Failure's attempt at mandating some perverse product differentiation, which bears as much similarity to surgery as bludgeoning a person to death with a hammer, but through true, non-crippling differentiation. Phenom IIIs get 12-cores, and the latest SSE instructions + something that the boys down in the instruction lab cook up; Opterons get larger caches + more cores + special server instruction sets that mean something concrete, even if it means implementing hardware Apache threads; that's on top of the SSE3 stuff and so forth. Would companies buy Opterons over Phenoms if one had hardware accelerated support for web services over the other? I believe the survey would say hell yes.

As for the GPU stuff, the low-cost, low-power stuff is nice for chump change, but it's a fierce market with many competitors. What you want, what large companies no doubt want, is the ability to slam in GPU-daughter boards, to add 10 or 20 7970 GPUs on a single board (preferably with sockets, which drives up the cost a few cents, but also taps into the smaller markets, where you may buy 4 GPUs now, and 6 later), so that they can drive those large super-computing projects that already make use of these GPUs, but do so more efficiently.

As for gaming, the more stream processors, I imagine, the better. When in doubt, double them, as it will give Intel and Nvidia something to curse over.

I don't have mod points but I am equally as puzzled. AMD haven't had that many opportunities over the past few years (none at all really) but that was certainly one.

Sadly the systems I work on are all Intel because we do a great deal of report and post-processing on data and that requires CPU grunt and running as much as we can in parallel. Had AMD done this they would have been under consideration. Hyper-threading makes very little if any difference to us really, it's all about getting as many full cores on as possible.

I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense

Perhaps they looked at IBM or Sun's implementation of SMT instead. Adding a second context to the POWER series added about 10% to the die area and gave around a 50% speedup. If you have multithreaded workloads (especially on a server) then it can significantly improve throughput for two very simple reasons. The first is that when one context has a cache miss, the CPU doesn't sit idle, it can let the other core work. The second is that it makes branch misprediction penalties lower, because if you're issuing instructions alternately from two contexts you can get the instruction that the branch depends on a lot closer to the end of the pipeline than before you need to make the prediction. This also helps with various other hazards, so you don't need so much logic for out-of-order execution to get the same throughput.

I guess you take the words of Intel fanboys literally. No, the Bulldozer architecture is not hyper-threading. No, it does not mean only a slight performance gain and especially not a performance loss. I recently made 3 microbenchmarks on an Opteron 6234 (Bulldozer too). I measured the negative effect of sharing some circuits in a Bulldozer core. This negative effect varies from insignificant to small (3%, 13%, 25%). I run the same two threads on the two cores of a single bulldozer unit vs two cores on separate units. Intel hyper-threading brings 30% more performance - in the best case. The bulldozer core pair brings 75% more performance - in the worst case. How can you compare them? They are not in the same league.

The funniest benchmark was the floating point. The most frequent complaint against the Bulldozer architecture is that two cores share a single floating point unit. AMD should tell one million times that yes, they share a single floating point unit, but that is a 256 bit wide unit, which can be split into two 128 bit parts. And what is the size of the usual floating point number? Not 256 bit, not 128 bit, but only 64. In reality I measured that the two cores in a single unit processes floating point instructions almost at full speed. The negative effect of circuit sharing was only 3%, barely measurable. How ironic.

200-250 Watts is perfectly fine in my world. I have an 850 Watt power supply in my main machine, I think it can supply the needed energy.

There has never been a chip to consume that much power because it would catch fire. It isn't speculation. The highest wattage CPU made was 140W. There is a really good reason for that. You can carry away all of the heat unless the cores are laid side by side, but then you would have a processor the size of your motherboard.

While you may have wandered in from the territory where the beige box is called the "hard drive" and the screen on the desk is called "the computer", there's people that work with the hardware, and some of that hardware is Xeons, 16 core AMD cpus, sparcs etc etc. Even though I'm only at the cheap end of that stuff I don't mistake the desktop for the "high end".

First you say they're bringing an 8 core chip to compete with a 4 core chip. Fine. Then you complain the cores cannot keep up 1:1. So you're expecting AMD's chips to be twice as good as intel's to be able to compete.

That, of course, is rigging the test, and so is dishonest.

One could also say that with single cores not much worse than the competition, but double the number of cores, and a lower price to boot, you get better value. Moreso if you can make good use of the double number of cores.

And that's before considering that single-core benchmarks are entirely unrepresentative for multi-core performance thanks to various tricks like turbo core and turbo boost — that aren't 1:1 comparable so you'd have to do full, sustained benchmarks on all cores simultaneously to find out which delivers the most sustained instructions per second.

Meaning that AMD's offering takes more marketing footwork, but technically is not all bad. Not at all.

Also, there is nothing about ARM that inherently makes it more powersaving @ the same performance level than other RISC CPUs, be it SPARC, POWER, MIPS and so on.

I can think of several things. For Thumb-2, there is instruction density. MIPS16 does about as well as Thumb-1, but it is massive pain to work with. AArch64 doesn't (yet) have a Thumb-3 encoding, but one will almost certainly appear after ARM has done a lot of profiling of the kinds of instruction that CPUs like to generate. Even in ARM mode, the big win over the other RISC architectures is the it has fairly complex addressing modes, so you can do things like structure and array offset calculations in one instruction on ARM or 3-4 on MIPS. For AArch32, you also have predicated instructions. These make a big difference on a very low power chip, because you don't need to have any branches for small conditionals. For AArch64, most of these are gone, but there is still a predicated move, which is a very powerful version of a select instruction and lets you do mostly the same things. With AArch32 you have store and load multiple instructions, which basically let you do all of your register spills and reloads in a single instruction (the instruction takes a mask of the registers to save, the register to use as the base, and whether to post- or pre- increment or decrement it as two flags). With AArch64, they replaced this with a store-pair instruction, which can store two registers, and has the advantage of being simpler to implement (fixed number of cycles to execute).

It's a relatively small club. Note that both the headline and summary are wrong. AMD has not licensed a processor design, they have licensed the right to make their own implementation of the ARMv8 architecture (which isn't just a piece of paper, it includes access to ARM's rich set of regression tests and assistance from ARM engineers when requested on both the hardware design and the supporting software). I know of three other companies working on ARMv8 designs. For ARMv7, I think there is basically only ARM with the Cortex series and Qualcomm with the Snapdragon (which is a massively hacked-up Cortex A8, with a completely redesigned FPU, a better interconnect, and some other improvements, but not a complete independent implementation). Compare this with the ARMv4 and ARMv5 situation, where StrongARM and XScale were complete independent implementations. ARM has intentionally delayed producing their own ARMv8 design to give other companies a chance and promote more competition. This worked very well for x86 during the '90s, when Intel, AMD, Cyrix/IBM, IDT, and others were all pushing out compatible products at different market segments. In the ARM world, because they all have to go through the same set of conformance tests, compatibility should be even higher.

Now, regarding Intel, the company that has bleeding edge fabs, as simply "one competitor" is a demagogy.
x86 is also so much more complex than ARM. AMD in ARM world would be like heavy weight boxer competing with a bunch of 60kg guys.